Corporate Bloggers Blogging for Business

The issue of corporate bloggers is a sticky one. Businesses and people who work for business have every right to blog. Their blogging can stick to the company line or not, but company blogs are usually “controlled” by the company. If the blogger can sound off against their company, they usually do so with the company’s blessing. This has worked for Scoble among others.

Still, it got me wondering about how many corporate blogs are out there. Blogging is still fairly new, and the business world was a little late to step into the fad, so I was curious about the numbers today. In an article from the Kansas City Star, “The Bottom Line on Blogging”, some interesting numbers on corporate blogger came to light.

Just as the estimates of bloggers worldwide vary wildly from 8 million to 23 million, there are no hard and fast statistics on corporate blogging.

But blog watchers — and yes, there are blogs that track business bloggers — say 23 of the Fortune 500 companies now have formal blogs. The practice has been institutionalized at companies such as Microsoft and IBM.

Smaller businesses with blogs probably number in the hundreds.

Companies are using blogs to build good will, to push their Web sites higher up on search engine lists and to get consumers talking about their brand…

…More than 2,000 employees blog at IBM. The number is even higher at Microsoft, where Scoble and 2,500 other employees write about their jobs regularly.

The article lists a lot of corporate blogs and bloggers without links to their blogs. If you are interesting in who, what, and how business is blogging, here are the links of those included in the list, and below, lists of other corporate blogs.

2 Comments

I think the article’s statement, “smaller businesses with blogs probably number in the hundreds” understates the situation. Based on what I see just in my industry (aviation), I think there are thousands.

But what I haven’t seen measured is “active blogs.” You see, it literally only takes minutes to create a blog from a free service. But to regularly post new content (the purpose of a blog) requires an ongoing effort. Many who start a blog fall off the sled after a few months. Heck, I see a lot of blogs with that initial “hello world” post, then nothing more.

Blogs that exist are easy to count. Blogs that are functioning are harder.

I don’t want to be a pest, but I thought I would point out the list of -small- business blogs on my website Pajama Market. Currently, I’ve reviewed 60 small businesses that are using blogs to promote themselves and have a running blogroll of them on my sidebar.

Finding small business blogs is not easy, and I wonder if there are currently “thousands” of them. As Max Flight says, most are not active blogs, but have been abandoned.

Please let me know if you find a small business blog that isn’t in my list. I’m always in need of new blogs to review.